LISA LOGAN

Fevered, rapid-pulse romance--paced by flashy, marginally appealing principals, going from riches to rags to riches again in super-posh English surroundings. Lisa Logan is the daughter of brittle social-butterfly Delia and WW I hero Angus--who, having squandered the family fortune, deserts his beloved daughter and unfaithful wife circa 1935. So the brink of bankruptcy now plunges hysterical Delia and 14-year-old Lisa from East Lancaster luxury to a slum house--the rent paid for by Delia's sexy lover, mill-owner Patrick Grey, who will not leave his wife Alice. But, while Delia is boozily helpless and headed to bonkerdom, little Lisa is determined to win it all back--and more, often turning her anger on Patrick's son Jonathan. Lisa's iron will and native shrewdness land her a job at the draper's shop of Richard Carr, a widower who lives with a horrid young daughter and severely possessivehousekeeper Millie; she marries Richard, has a son, but prefers business planning to docile domesticity. And though the marriage is companionable enough, Lisa's love for Richard never quite has the pizazz of her feelings for Jonathan--who is always unaccountably there at all the watershed crises in her life. But can these two, now both married, cause the same destruction their parents wrought via adultery? Well, despite one provident death, it will be some time before Lisa--now head of a huge dress manufacturing company--can winnow out all the hurts from her father's desertion, Richard's deception (a Millie one-night-stand), and Jonathan's offering of a love he has no right to give. Overheated but gutsy, in early-Cookson style--with some familiar scullery/boudoir tunes on the old Double Standard.